We use “Stemming”. Stemming is the process by which a popular keyword can be associated with a prefix, suffix or pluralization, so that more matches can be found. Without stemming, a search for "work" would not return results that contained the word "works" or "working", for example.

We have about 650 “Stop” words listed. Stop words are popular words that add no value to search queries and thus should be ignored. For instance, imagine there are two topics in a community: "How do I make coffee?" and "How do I eat lasagna?". Searching for "How do I make coffee?" would bring up the topic about lasagna because the words "how do I" are found in it, even though they add no value to the search. When indexing occurs, we manipulate the content to remove stop words so that only relevant content is available for searching.

There are two different ways public search happens. One is the basic Topic Search function which utilizes the features listed above. The other is the “Topic intercept” that our system performs when someone submits something through the “Start a Topic” box at the top of the Community Home Page and within the Feedback Widget. In addition to the main Topic Search functionality mentioned above, the “topic intercept” results have some ranking algorithms applied to them. The weight of “answered” Questions, “solved” Problems, and Company Updates is ranked higher than than the weight of other topics.

We do not currently support exact matches or logical terms (allows matches to obey AND, OR and NOT commands -- also known as “Boolean”), however those updates are on our future improvements list, as is Analytics around search data. Unfortunately, there is no current date set for these items yet, but we do desperately want them.

If you’re listed as an Employee of a community in Get Satisfaction, you’ll have access to the Management View which has a topic search that functions the same way it does in the public search but includes many additional filtering and sorting options (such as specific product, specific tag, specific statuses, date ranges, among other things) as well as people search to enhance the searching capabilities.

Why are exact matches not supported????? Why would you force people to get useless, unrelated, unhelpful results when all they're trying to do is NOT have to create new topics by searching!!! It DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!! thats wonderful that you dont support boolean.. fine... But to search for "desktop alerts" (for example) and for the first result to have nothing to do with query is stupid!!!

How is this optimal?? What purpose could this stupidity POSSIBLY SERVE?!!!??

Hi there, sorry you are frustrated with our search. I'd like to offer an interim solution that works great, while we're building out our search. If you go to Google and search for "desktop alerts" site:getsatisfaction.com you'll see the results you want.

This only brings the problem full circle. The reason i'm searching for "desktop alerts" is because this is a feature of Mozilla Thunderbid. Their site, "mozilla messaging" uses this ..[expletive should be here].. software. I tried to use search operators and realized you guys PURPOSEFULLY designed the software to be broken and to intentionally spew out bloated, useless, intentionally misleading and incorrect results.

Therefore, the next workaround that i tried was your belated suggestion. To illustrate its failings, here is a random thread from 2010:

after you put those two together, you'll see why your belated workaround is UNACCEPTABLE. Having already tried what you belatedly suggest, this is why i started posting here in the first place!!! I wanted to vilify mozilla, but their only problem was choosing this software that you guys wrote!

WHY IS THIS SOFTWARE INTENTIONALLY HANDICAPPED!? ITS 2011. THE ONLY EXPLANATION FOR THIS TO OCCUR IS THAT IT WAS INTENTIONAL. I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHY!!!!

Hi. Please know that we are not intentionally handicapping our search. We did a big upgrade to our search earlier this year and switched search servers. The new server we're using is more robust but came with it's own complexities. There are some specific technical hairballs around integrating exact matches and Boolean search which we just haven't had a chance to tackle yet. Our search upgrade is a big project and is being done in a phased approach. The next phase will include addressing this, but due to other priorities I'm not sure where on the current roadmap it is.

Again, I apologize for your frustrating experience here. We get frustrated by our search functionality as well and really hope that the additional improvements can get on the schedule soon.

Hi Chad. So now that we know you're talking about tags :), you mean that you'd like a search field in the Management View that is for searching tags only? Our topic search does search tags as they *are* indexed, but you're right that there's no specific tag search. You can also click on any given tag to see all the topics that have that tag and get a direct URL to that tag. So that means that you could just put a URL in the address field of your browser that looks like this: http://getsatisfaction.com/[COMPANY]/.... For instance, I can do that for the tag "search" in our community: http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfa...

I know that's not exactly what you're asking for, but maybe it helps a bit. Otherwise, your request for a tag search field in the Mgmt View is noted. :)

Until Get Satisfaction rolls out their boolean search, here's a workaround.

If you are technical or know somebody technical who can hack my scripts (I know that rules out 99% of you reading this :-( but for the 1% :-) who know Ruby and MongoDB it's not that hard!) all you need to do is:

We do not currently support exact matches or logical terms (allows matches to obey AND, OR and NOT commands -- also known as “Boolean”), however those updates are on our future improvements list, as is Analytics around search data. Unfortunately, there is no current date set for these items yet, but we do desperately want them.

I had a wish list in http://gsfn.us/t/15fml which for some reason got merged into this topic here. The most attractive workaround for a user without having access to the management view (which is a bit better than the options for a regular user but still much less than possible with other search engines) is to simply go to Google and add site:getsatisfaction.com/your_community and use their search and sorting tools.

Oh, and that other topic of yours wasn't merged into this one. I just added a "redirect" at the top which is basically just adding a link saying "here's some useful info". I did that with all our search related topics since I was able to give a comprehensive explanation in this topic about how our search currently functions. Don't worry, though, we are still tracking your Idea topic and all your suggestions.

Thanks so much for taking the time to send in this feedback and sorry for all the frustrations it has caused. I'm meeting with our Product Manager about Search later this week and will update you on any progress that I am able to share. I'll definitely be sure to ask about Google.

I just wanted to let you know that I'm meeting with our Product Manager later this week, and we're going to be talking about search. I'll ask about the filter capabilities, and will pass along any progress that I'm able to share publicly. Thanks in advance for your patience!

The feedback on our search functionality is much appreciated. There's not doubt, we have much to improve. Elevating the relevance of results and adding Boolean logic functionality is on our product roadmap for the second half of this year.

Our engineering roadmap calls for search scalability work to support the growth of our business and the volume of search queries. These growing pains are frustrating, but necessary for us to move through so that we build our next generation search algorithm on a solid foundation.

In the meantime, as our product managers & engineers finalize the requirements for the next gen version of Get Sat search - we are on the lookout for incremental improvements that can be made along the way. As we spot these opportunities, we will do our best to bring them into the product in an agile fashion.

We apologize for the frustration many of you, our valued customers and community members have expressed and we'll keep you updated in the second half of the year as we move closer to a release of the new search functionality. In the meantime, please keep the ideas and feature requests flowing. We capture these requests and review them carefully as a product, support and engineering team.

Currently there isn't a way to include "stop words" in your search keywords, and our search algorithm strips ".com" from search keywords, which can interfere when searching for URLs. As our Chief Product Officer noted above in his official response, we're sensitive to the fact that there's room for improvement in our search functionality, and improving search result relevancy and adding Boolean syntax is on our product roadmap for the second half of this year.

We use “Stemming”. Stemming is the process by which a popular keyword can be associated with a prefix, suffix or pluralization, so that more matches can be found. Without stemming, a search for "work" would not return results that contained the word "works" or "working", for example.

We have roughly 650 “Stop” words. Stop words are popular words that add no value to search queries and thus should be ignored. For instance, imagine there are two topics in a community: "How do I make coffee?" and "How do I eat lasagna?". Searching for "How do I make coffee?" would bring up the topic about lasagna because the words "how do I" are found in it, even though they add no value to the search. When indexing occurs, we manipulate the content to remove stop words so that only relevant content is available for searching.

There are two different ways public search happens. One is the basic Topic Search function which utilizes the features listed above. The other is the “Topic intercept” that our system performs when someone submits something through the “Start a Topic” box at the top of the Community Home Page and within the Feedback Widget. In addition to the main Topic Search functionality mentioned above, the “topic intercept” results have some ranking algorithms applied to them. The weight of “answered” Questions, “solved” Problems, and Company Updates is ranked higher than than the weight of other topics.

If you’re listed as an Employee of a community in Get Satisfaction, you’ll have access to the Management View which has a topic search that functions the same way it does in the public search but includes many additional filtering and sorting options (such as specific product, specific tag, specific statuses, date ranges, among other things) as well as people search to enhance the searching capabilities.

AND and OR can be ordered to achieve results similar to using ()
For example if
Search = removing topics OR deleting topics
Results = topics that either contain both terms removing topics or contain both terms deleting topics.
If your search is
Search = change AND password
Results = Will contain topics that contain both terms change and password.

By default our searches are implicit AND which means that when you do not put any Boolean operator (AND/OR) in between terms it will look for topics that contain all the terms in the query. eg. change password will return all topics that contain both the terms change and password.
In the case of lower case "and" what you are noticing is this behavior. Lowercase "and" and "or" are stopwords hence eliminated. The terms in the query are then joined by implicit AND and the response is returned.

Hi,
Yo say "We index the Topic Title, Topic Description, tags, products and replies"
Question: Does the search also finds word matches at the body of the post or only on those fiedls being indexed?
The reason is that we have some jpg files and I was thinking that we shouldl change it to html so search could also find the text. But I wuold liketo be sure.
Thanks